Hacker News Reader

Comment by rfoo | Hacker News Reader

> Now developers EXPECT languages to come with a FREE suit of command line tools for linting, static analysis, formatting, package management and what not.

The key selling point of Intellij IDEA is they come with semantic refactoring tools, for something like "move this method into its parent class" or "extract the selected methods to a new interface", which is still rarely seen in the wild, and didn't get mentioned at all in your list, but it saves real time.

View on HN

It saves real time if you write your code the way IntelliJ wants you to write your code.

If you structure things differently - say, by steering clear of subclass inheritance, or keeping interfaces small, or not using the Bean pattern, then you can pretty quickly discover that there aren't all that many IDE refactorings that you actually use.

At this point, most the refactorings and code actions that I'm actually using exist in vscode as well; IntelliJ's main advantage is that I'm (somewhat) more able to use them efficiently without taking my hands off the keyboard.

Extract interface, implement interface, extract method, move(to own file) only exist for go and c# via jet rains and are practical for anyone writing real world code.

Visual Studio does at least some of those for C#.

And vscode has them for Typescript at the least, I suspect several other languages support them.

VSCode C# extension supports all of those.

They’re immensely useful tools when working in large poorly-structured codebases, and they are more than worth it when dealing with stuff like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com